A number of companies have joined Facebook’s suit against Israeli company NSO Group, which it accused of targeting certain users of its encrypted messaging services WhatsApp using spyware, Reuters reported. The lawsuit was filed in late 2019. It will be joined by Microsoft and Google, as well as Cisco, VMWare and the Internet Association, which together filed an amicus brief in federal court, warning that the NSO’s tools were “powerful and dangerous.”
NSO has argued that it should benefit from “sovereign immunity,” a legal status that can protect foreign governments from lawsuits, because it sells digital break-in tools to police and spy agencies. NSO lost that argument in the Northern District of California in July and has since appealed to the Ninth Circuit to have the ruling overturned.
The companies filing the brief said that awarding sovereign immunity to NSO would lead to a proliferation of hacking technology and “more foreign governments with powerful and dangerous cyber surveillance tools.” These tools could fall into the wrong hands and get used nefariously, the letter continued.
